Storyline
How Chapel Hill got its new Carolina Theatre on Franklin Street: the theatre chain’s purchase of the lot in 1941, the planning commission’s Colonial front by Archie Davis, the groundbreaking, the wartime halt of 1942, the October opening and the old house renamed The Village.
In briefA federal order halting construction of theatres stopped work on Chapel Hill's new Carolina Theatre on June 6, 1942, with the building about 85 percent complete. In 1941 Wilby-Kincey, which ran the Carolina and Pick theatres, had bought a Franklin Street lot for a fireproof theatre with 1,200 seats. At the urging of its local manager, E. Carrington Smith, the chain agreed to follow a Colonial front approved by the town's new planning commission, and ground was broken in December 1941. Smith applied for permission to finish, and the theatre at 108 East Franklin Street opened on October 15, 1942. The older house became The Village, showing the Navy Pre-Flight School's free movies for cadets.
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No works in the index are currently linked directly to this storyline. The works below provide background on Wars & Military Service.
By July 18, 1941 Wilby-Kincey, which ran the Carolina and Pick theatres, had bought from the A. B. Roberson estate the lot beside the Texaco station on Franklin Street for a fireproof theatre with a Colonial front and 1,200 seats, as many as the two old houses together. By November 28 Chapel Hill's new planning commission, chaired by H. G. Baity, had approved sketches by Durham architect Archie Davis for the Colonial front, and the chain agreed to follow them at the urging of its local manager, E. Carrington Smith. Ground was broken on December 9, 1941, with the Stuart Construction Company of High Point as contractor. On June 6, 1942, with the building about 85 percent complete, a federal order halting construction of theatres and other places of entertainment stopped the work. Smith applied for permission to finish it for a September opening. The two-story brick theatre at 108 East Franklin Street, with a steep roof, dormers and brick pediments and arches, the one building in its block to follow the Williamsburg plan, opened with dedication ceremonies on October 15, 1942. That day the older house on the north side of the street took the name The Village. It was closed to the public and showed the Navy Pre-Flight School's free movies for cadets.
Events in this storyline, in date order. See these 6 dated events in the chronology →
Buildings, schools, churches and other sites named in the dated events on this page, the most often named first. The map shows the 2 with a known location.
Map tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors. Site locations from the N.C. State Historic Preservation Office survey, Open Orange, Orange County GIS, OpenStreetMap and a few other published sources named on each site’s page; town and community pins show approximate locations.
Background reading on Wars & Military Service. These works cover the broader subject and may not discuss this storyline. Follow a link to find a copy or view the material.
A picture book set in the Eno River valley of Orange County in 1776. Four red wolf pups are born in a woodland den and spend their first summer and fall learning to hunt and howl with their family, while nearby a young widow, Sally Few, keeps her household going as the Revolution unsettles the countryside. Eileen Heyes wrote the story, published in 2025 by the North Carolina Office of Archives and History with color illustrations and maps, 42 pages.
Anne R. Keene's history of the Cloudbusters, the baseball team of the Navy Pre-Flight School at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill during the Second World War, on which Ted Williams played in 1943. The chapters move from a batboy's trunk of keepsakes through the pre-flight training program to the players' lives after the war, and Keene's own family is part of the story. Published by Sports Publishing in New York in 2018, 340 pages with sixteen pages of plates.
Alex Albright's history of the B-1 band, the group of Black musicians drawn largely from students and graduates of North Carolina A&T who became the first Black sailors of the modern Navy to serve above the rank of messman, and the first of more than a hundred Black Navy bands in wartime. The band was posted to the Navy Pre-Flight School at Chapel Hill, the book's Orange County link. Published by R.A. Fountain in 2013, 194 pages with illustrations and portraits.
Suzanne Adair's 2011 mystery, one of her Michael Stoddard novels, set in Hillsborough during the Southern campaign of the American Revolution and written as a historical thriller. Adair is a North Carolina author.
Letters of the Sparrow family, including Thomas Sparrow and George Attmore Sparrow, gathered and published in 2011. The correspondence includes material associated with the Hillsboro' Military Academy, which opened in Hillsborough in 1859, and combines family and military history.
Stewart E. Dunaway's account of the Battle of Lindley's Mill, fought in September 1781 after the Loyalist David Fanning raided Hillsborough and carried off Governor Thomas Burke. Burke, Fanning and the Lindley family, whose mill gave the fight its name, are the people at its center, with the Revolutionary campaigns in North Carolina as the frame. Published in 2009.
Stewart E. Dunaway's transcription of letters exchanged between Jesse Benton and Thomas Hart from 1780 to 1790, concerning Hart's affairs at Hartford, his place at Hillsborough. The letters concern the economic and social conditions of Hillsborough in the eighteenth century and the Revolution in North Carolina. Self-published through lulu.com in 2009, 68 pages with illustrations and facsimiles, and part of the library's Wall Local History Collection.
Suzy Barile's account of Eleanor Hope Swain, daughter of the University of North Carolina's president, and Smith D. Atkins, the Union general whose troops occupied Chapel Hill in April 1865; the two married later that year. Published by Eno in Hillsborough in 2009, 237 pages with illustrations and portraits.
Civil War letters of Colonel Frank Schaller of the 22nd Mississippi Infantry, combining personal narrative with regimental history. Schaller was associated with the Hillsboro Military Academy in Hillsborough. Published by the University of South Carolina Press in 2007. 185 pages with six pages of plates and illustrations.
A congregational history of New Hope Presbyterian Church in Orange County, written by Barbara A. Murphy and published in 2006 by Chapel Hill Press. Chapters take up the five successive church buildings, the land itself, the ministers who served, the cemeteries, members who went to war, the church's organization, its music, gifts and memorials, and its outreach to the surrounding community. It also covers Presbyterian experience of the Civil War. 126 pages with illustrations and portraits.
The Rev. Charles M. Jones (1906-1993), minister of Chapel Hill's Presbyterian church in the late 1940s, and his wife Dorcas talk with John Egerton in a Southern Oral History Program interview recorded July 21, 1990. Jones spends most of the hour on the disputes his stand on race provoked, when the regional presbytery objected to his conduct of the church, and his dealings with university president Frank Porter Graham. Published online in 2006 by the UNC-Chapel Hill Library in Documenting the American South.
Guion Griffis Johnson (1900-1989), a historian of the antebellum South, talked with Jacquelyn Hall and Mary Frederickson in August 1974 for the Southern Oral History Program. She recalls her training, her years at the Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina, the standing of women historians in higher education, and the research behind her study of antebellum North Carolina society. Running about an hour; electronic edition issued by the UNC library in 2006 through Documenting the American South.
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